ON THIS DAY

October 10, 2018

OCTOBER 10, 1939 MR T. E. Thomas, manager of London Passenger Transport Board, wants to abolish car horns. In his address to the Institute of Transport, he said: ‘The sounding of a horn is promoted not by care, but by carelessness. Its effect is not to warn, but to scare.’ OCTOBER 10, 1967 THE Queen’s traditional Christmas broadcast will be screened in colour this year for the first time. It is estimated that only 40,000 homes will have colour sets by then.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

AMANDA BURTON, 62. The actress from Northern Ireland starred in Brookside and Silent Witness. A descendant of oscar Wilde, Burton (right) says she is ‘an absolute pyromaniac’ and is a drummer in the marching band of the Hastings Bonfire Society. She claims her biggest regret is ‘that I was such a grumpy cow in my 40s!’

NICHOLAS PARSONS, 95. In June, the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Just A Minute missed his first episode of the show in 50 years but took to Twitter to reassure listeners ‘the apocalypse is not upon us’. Parsons used to finish his Fifties cabaret act with a skit of Winston Churchill giving a cookery talk about a cabinet pudding. He said his mother was worried a showbusiness career would see him ‘end up as an alcoholic or pervert in the gutter’.

BORN ON THIS DAY

HAROLD PINTER (19302008). The playwright, (right) who wrote The Caretaker and No Man’s Land, became so famous for pregnant pauses in dialogue between his characters that the phrase ‘Pinteresque’ — meaning an awkward silence — entered the vernacular. ‘Those silences,’ Pinter said, ‘have achieved such significance that they have overwhelmed the bloody plays, which I find a bloody pain in the a***.’

Ed Wood (1924-1978). The U.S. film-maker was given a Golden Turkey Award as Worst director of All Time in 1975, renewing public interest in his camp, low-budget movies. Johnny depp later played him in a biopic. Wood, an occasional cross dresser with a femail alter ego, Shirley, became an alcoholic and died of a heart attack in poverty.

ON OCTOBER 10… IN 1903,

the Women’s Social and Political Union was founded to campaign for women’s suffrage.

IN 1939,

Eleanor Rigby died, aged 44. Her grave in Liverpool was just yards from where Paul McCartney and John Lennon first met in 1957, but McCartney insists the Eleanor Rigby in his hit song was fictitious.